training

Of course we don’t want to win the Primatorky and the Masters Nationals this year, like we did last year. Therefore, we haven’t been on the water in an eight yet. Actually, we aren’t training at all. If we show up at those races, it will be the first time we sit together in a boat.

So, today, we didn’t go out with a nearly complete crew and one substitute. We didn’t work on technique and we didn’t have long discussions on what we should improve in our stroke. We didnt do those technique drills at all and it didn’t come together for s few stretches. The following chart is not from a Masters eight. Our competitors can sleep quietly.

The first 15 minute of this chart is noise because I mounted the mount and started BoatCoach when the boat was in the rack, before we didn’t launch.

This was another planned hard workout. On Thursday and Friday, I had to work long and I didn’t have time for rowing. I felt pretty bad about missing two sessions and was prepared to make this an extra hard one to compensate.

A nice 2x3km, with a 5 minute break in between. Instructions from the coach. First one in 26spm, second one in 28spm. He writes instructions for pairs and fours, and has explained me many times that singles rowers subtract 2 from the SPM values. So I was supposed to do this at 24spm and 26spm. Of course I forgot.

It doesn’t work like that.

I arrived at the club at 9:30, just in time for my sons to start their training. I quickly changed to rowing gear (shorts, it was only 9 degrees but very sunny).

When we arrived the lake showed its mirror flat side, but the weather forecast had predicted a pretty strong wind, so I wasn’t sure it would remain flat. When I launched and during the warming up, the water was still nice, and I didn’t notice that the tailwind slowly increased in strength.

I turned around at Rokle and got ready for my first 3k. Go!

A few minutes later it was the 20th minute in the chart below.

With around 1.6km to go, this wasn’t going well. My heart rate was very high and I was having difficulty holding the stroke rate. Also, I was rowing very hard on the first part of the drive and I had the feeling this wasn’t sustainable.

It was a head wind and it was stronger than I had expected, and little waves were starting to build.

All this was adding up in my brain, and I stopped abruptly. Then continued technique drills at low stroke rate.

At Sirka, I turned around and drank some water, then got ready for Plan B – do the second 3km in 24spm and focus on taking a light catch. Even in the tailwind, the rowing wasn’t easy. The waves were getting bigger, and I was not as fresh as I wanted.

I held that for 10 minutes, then stopped.

It wasn’t to be, today.

I did run the Quiske app during the “intensive” parts of this session, and the charts are shown above. The lines are averages over pretty short time intervals. I think they are the average over about 10 strokes maximum, perhaps fewer. The Black line is the average over the entire session. The curves look pretty close to the single stroke ones that the Quiske RowP app shows during the row. I started an interesting discussion on the in-stroke data over at the Rowing Data Analysis Facebook Group. I am thinking deeply about that first acceleration bump around 7% into the stroke. According to Kleshnev, having this bump, i.e. a local maximum in the acceleration, is good.

The wiggles around 45% of the stroke are bad. These are my fast hands away. At the end of the second 3km stretch, I did a little photo shoot. First, the selfies:

Then, the scenery:

And, finally, the rowing kit:

You cannot see the Android phone with the RowP app, because I had taken it out of the RAM mount (on the right, behind the wing rigger) to take the pictures. Also invisible is the RowP pod under the seat. Seat dynamics didn’t reveal any interesting insights, so I didn’t bother adding the pictures to the blog.

Yes, this was a confrontation with the skills of a rower who has spent more than four months on the erg. I am missing the subtlety in the catch. I am not able to dose my power wisely. I get thrown off by little waves. I guess all this will improve in the coming month.

Wednesday, April 4, on the very first training day for the CVK Brno Masters Eight, I arrived at the club and we were complete! The eight core rowers of the team were all there, and we even had my son Robin as a coxswain.

The session itself was just a steady state row, to get used to each other. We took the old Empacher eight and set out, starting with only the bow four rowing, then changing that to stroke four, and finally getting all eight together about 2km in.

The row itself was nice, despite the big waves. If I was alone, I wouldn’t have gone out in a single, but in the eight it is doable. We are not quite the shock, awe and terror inciting eight person rowing machine that we were last season (were we?), but it was a good start. If we can keep this up, our competitors should start to worry.

I wanted to start with a OTW “How To” this week, but as I was a bit disorganized, this row was a mess, from the data perspective. As I have no good place to fix the NK SpeedCoach on my place at 2 seat, I decided to take the waterproof Samsung phone and the RAM mount, which is attachable to almost any boat, and run BoatCoach. That was a good idea, but I failed to get it connected to the Wahoo Tickr X heart rate belt that I was wearing.

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The other complication was that it was pretty choppy weather. Good that BoatCoach has a “splashguard mode”, preventing splashes to activate the touch screen. Well … except when a drop hits the “back” button, which happened about 200m in on the first 3km leg after the warming up. The waves were fierce, and I was getting a good deal of water sprayed over myself as well.

Rowing is a great sport. You go backwards slowly while ice cold water is thrown at you. What can be more fun?

I was trying to concentrate on rowing sweep, but I do confess that the splashes doing random touch screen presses on the BoatCoach app were a bit of a distraction. This being sweep rowing, I cheekily used my left hand on a few strokes to try to contain the damage. The drops had managed to get to the window which asks if you really want to shut down the app, and I really didn’t. It requires a bit of timing, but I managed to hit Cancel just before the catch, then exit from some menus.

Then there was another annoyance after the row. I have programmed BoatCoach to offer sending Raw Data per Email before closing the app. This is a great feature. Back at the dock, you exit the app, accept the offer to email the raw data, and send them to workouts@rowsandall.com. Before you start your shower, the workout is on the site.

It doesn’t work like that when you row in an eight. Arriving at the dock, I exited the app, but then we had to get out of the boat in a synchronized way, and carry the boat up to the boat house, all the while with the email window open. By the time I had removed the phone and the mount from the boat, the window and the BoatCoach app had already closed.

It took some time to locate the raw data file on the phone when I was preparing for this blog. I also had to sync the Wahoo Tickr X with the phone to get a TCX file, which I uploaded to rowsandall.com to try and Data Fusion heart rate data into the workout. I also had to run the Rowsandall rowing physics module to get estimated power data. All that to be admired in the resulting plot:

(I think each data channel is slightly time shifted with respect to the other. I didn’t do a particularly good job at aligning them.)

So lots of data talk, but no real data “how-to”. Rather a “what not to do”, I would say.

It was a nice technique row in the eight though, despite the ice cold splashes.

No training. Too jetlagged and also having a cold. We did make a nice excursion to a nearby Chateau.

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Monday

Too strong wind for rowing. I did a one hour swim in the indoor 50m pool.

Tuesday

I created my new training plan for the coming period today, and I was able to weave in quite a lot of the sessions suggested by our club’s head coach. This is not always the case, but this time it worked out.

We’re going out in the eight tomorrow, and I am going to strongly suggest that that will be a steady state session. Some in this Masters rowers group have a tendency to want to do speed work on every outing, but I think that a nice technique row is more appropriate for our first row of the season. That was the reason for me to do the 4x5min/4min at 28/30spm today, so I could claim having it already done, and needing a steady state session.

The training was “4x5min/4min with 5min as 3min @ 28spm, 2min @ 30spm”. I decided to reduce the recommended stroke rates by 2, as I was rowing in a single (and because I haven’t rated up yet this year).

It was pretty windy and choppy when I launched, so I sought shelter in the gorge. There is a stretch that is a little longer than 1km and pretty straight, so there is where I would be doing my 5 minute intervals.

I still haven’t found my OTW rowing routine. Today, I forgot to pack the heart rate belt.

I am pretty happy with the achieved boat speed. There was a big difference between tail wind (first and third intervals) and head wind (second and fourth intervals) and in the fourth interval I was both tired and steering, as I ended up doing the 28spm bit in the first part of the windy stretch.

In the Flex charts, you can see how I got tired, and especially the Wash number deterioriated (or was it the steering).

I also had a problem with the Empower Oarlock disconnecting and reconnecting several times during the row.I just upgraded the firmware Perhaps it will help.

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Today was also the first row with the Quiske pod. I used the sensor pod under the seat. I was curious to see if there would be any differences between the head wind and tail wind intervals and between the first ones when I was fresh and the last ones. Let’s first look at boat acceleration for the 26spm and 28spm bits.

Boat Acceleration 26spm bitsBoat Acceleration 28spm bits

That looks pretty consistent. No big differences between the intervals. A bit more spread in the data in the recovery part of the 28spm acceleration curves, compared to 26spm. These bits, two minutes which I counted as 8×7 strokes to survive them, were pretty hard. I conclude that I was able to row 26spm consistently, but have to work on the recovery at higher stroke rates. The acceleration from the minimum speed (left part of the chart) looks OK to me, but I am curious to see what the Quiske crew thinks of it. In 26spm, you see a slight acceleration (or reduced deceleration) in the very final part of the recovery. I was paying attention to accelerating slightly up the slide in that final part, and taking light catches.

Now, let’s look at the Seat Speed:

Seat Speed 26spm bitsSeat Speed 28spm bits

Funny, I can not see that acceleration on the recovery which I could very distinctly feel as a slight leg pull. I guess one would have to compare with a baseline of people who don’t do this.

Another fun thing is that the Quiske file can be exported to a CSV which is compatible with Rowsandall.com. I imported that file and was able to do a couple of nice charts.

I am expecting that seat speed is more or less linear in boat speed and that the seat recovery speed is more independent. This chart is seat speed (drive & recovery) vs boat speed. Here, I am really just exploring the data, to see if I can make sense of it and possibly derive a useful technique metric.

It is difficult to make sense of these charts now, but perhaps after a couple of rows I will start to understand.

I have also created a data set with all the data from the two rows. If I find time tomorrow, I will do some correlation analysis. Big fun!

The Veterans Ladies were missing a fourth person, so they offered me a stroke seat in a quad outing on Sunday afternoon. I was in for a nice, short row, so I gladly accepted.

Romana and I arrived early because there was some work to do. First, we put our single and double back on slings. Some experiments on Saturday had revealed that the new tight racks are a bit too tight. The guy who built them used two of the smallest boats as measures and some boats simply don’t fit. Everything has to be disassembled and rebuilt from scratch.

Then, I wanted to make sure the quad was in good order. There are a few crews in our club with a habit of cannibalizing club equipment, so in the popular boats you can never be sure you are using the original foot stretchers, sliding seats, and more.

The situation was not good. A lot of red C rings were missing under the oarlocks, and the club’s spare part are in Italy with the Juniors and Men on their rowing camp. So I had to take from my own spare parts collection. Also, the stroke seat foot stretcher was not the original one, but I had no way to fix that, and finally some parts of the rudder were missing. The boat was rowable, but it would take a bit more effort for me as a steering stroke to make sure we were going straight.

Finally, we launched, and in the mean time the wind had strengthened. It was a few degrees above the freezing point and the waves were pretty strong. After building up from arms only to a full length stroke, I settled on 16 SPM and we tried to steady the balance on waves, in a blazing tailwind, at this low stroke rate.

I love these kind of challenges, and I think it really helped us rowing technically well, when we went in to the narrow twisty bit of the gorge at the north end of our lake. The idea was to find quiet water, and we did.

It was nice to find out I could still toe steer a quad blindly through the narrow twisty bit. With a slow turning boat you have to make sure you are a little “higher” going into a turn, and I managed pretty well, relying on our bow seat to be on the lookout for any traffic or obstacles.

Out of the twisty part, we were all glad and looking forward for the straight kilometer, and I guess our bow seat reduced the frequency of looking. In fact, it was me who spotted the ice first, and very late. We made an emergency stop, breaking ice with our blades and boat, turning the river into a huge black field looking like a gigantic glass of Coke with ice cubes.

We backed out of our Coke with ice, then turned the boat, and headed back for the lake.

The wind had gotten stronger, a head wind now, and we were slow in making progress. When we were half way the lake, our 2 seat asked that we Row back to the club. I didn’t blame her, because through the waves, she and bow seat were wet from head to toe from splashes of icy water.

We returned safe and put the boat in slings for s thorough inspection. Luckily, no scratches or anything from our ice breaking adventure. We did mention the ice in our incident report but the bit about missing boat parts was longer.

I am typing this from a British Airways flight from Vienna to Heathrow, where I will board a plane to Phoenix, Arizona.

How-to

With no holder for a SpeedCoach and classical riggers on this quad, I decided to use the BoatCoach Android app on my waterproof Samsung phone. This works perfectly with the RAM mount and BoatCoach has a splash guard mode preventing splashes to accidentally activate the touch screen.

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After working through a few data related bugs with the BoatCoach developer last fall, this app is pretty good for recording and showing stroke rate. I still think the user interface is overly complex, though. Using the app for the first time after a few months, I wasn’t sure if I was recording the outing at all, or if the app only recorded the data after starting a “piece”. As I hate having my crew waiting for me fiddling with menus and settings, I just kept the settings as is and hoped for the best. As a backup, I also recorded position and heart rate with the Garmin Forerunner watch. This connects to my Wahoo Tickr X heart rate belt through the ANT+ protocol. I was glad I did, because it turns out the BoatCoach app hadn’t connected with the BLE channel of the heart rate belt. So I ended up uploading two separate data sets to Rowsandall.com and then using Data Fusion to merge them.

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The power data were calculated using Rowsandall.com’s Physics Module. For this to work well, you need to input wind (strong today) and current (not applicable to this row), set the boat type correctly and estimate the average crew weight. If you get all this right, the Physics Module does a pretty good job at estimating power from boat speed and stroke rate. It is accurate enough to get a good value for the average and normalized Power, which is currently the most important metric for me on an outing like this. I just use it to get a value for the training load. As we rowed only 40 minutes and most of it was well below 20spm, the training load wasn’t very heavy.

After four-and-a-half months of rowing on ergs, I had an opportunity to row on the water again! My last recorded workout with the NK SpeedCoach was early November.

I took the scooter to the rowing club, and took out the single for a thorough check before hitting the water. The lake water is of course still ice cold from melting snow, so I wanted to be 100% certain that my material was OK. Didn’t fancy a flip because of a material failure.

The Junior 15/16 boys were there unloading my trailer, which I had allowed them to use for their spring training camp in Racice. They had been able to do 30km per day on average only. On a few days, the Racice canal was covered by a thin layer of ice.

The older Juniors are on a training camp in Gavirate, Italy, rowing on sunny lake Varese.

We also have new boat racks in hangar 4. (Or hangar “IIII” as it is illogically marked. With the other hangars names “I”, “II”, and “III”, one would expect “IV”.) As the number of private and club boats is increasing, we needed to create new rack space, so a more dense arrangement was created. I was not so pleased to find out that our double “Orca” had been used by the builders to test the racks, and in fact had written an angry email when I found out about that.

The consequence though was that the front racks for doubles and pairs are too close to the hangar door for a Salani double which is slightly longer than our Wintechs. So before I could hit the water, I spent some time with Romana figuring out where to put “Orca” (our 2x) and “Dolfijn” (our single). In the end we found a good solution. As rack space is now very tight and the risks of scratching another boat is highly increased, we put both boats close together. Also, we should make some covers for the oarlock pins.

Another complication was that I found out I forgot to bring the SpeedCoach holder. As I am riding on the scooter and not traveling by car, I had to pack my rowing stuff in a slightly smaller bag, and I forgot to take the holder. I managed to improvise a way to fix the SpeedCoach to my wing rigger and off I went.

I consider this a baseline row. I didn’t take much notice of the values on the SpeedCoach or do any technique drills. Instead, I just enjoyed being out on the water again and rowed 18-20spm steady state.

The Brno lake was black and smooth like oil. No waves whatsoever. Only in the final 2k rowing home a cold headwind started to blow. At that moment, I was glad I had enough layers on.

After 15.5km in the single, I had a few blisters. Took a picture of the worst ones for my readers to admire. Tomorrow, we’re going out in a 4x.

On Monday, I am up at 3:30 to go to the airport and spend a week in Arizona. Lots of desert running planned for that week. No time to row in Tempe, unfortunately.

This was supposed to be a steady state day, but I bailed out. It was a long working day, and then in the evening I got stuck working on integrating the rowsandall.com site with Amazon Web Services. We’re now using AWS Simple Email Services for sending out mail from the site. This helps to prevent notifications ending up in people’s Spam boxes. As often, I was a bit more ambitious than I should and tried to revamp the email messages in one go. I had everything working on my local notebook, but when I tried it out on the development test server, the damn thing didn’t load well. I managed to fix it but that took the entire evening.

Tuesday

Travel to Brussels. This was a planned rest/travel day and I respected it. There is some summit going on in Brussels, so all the hotels have crazy room prices. I ended up in a hotel near the Jubelpark where I had never stayed. Turns out the hotel doesn’t have a gym.

Wednesday

Hotel room workout. I lacked the motivation but still got out of bed. However, in this old building the wooden floors were quite loud, and I didn’t want to wake the guest in the room beneath me, so I just did one series of what was supposed to be a much longer session.

After a long meeting I headed to the airport and flew back to Vienna, then took a company car to Brno. Arrived at 22:30.

Thursday

First day of a two day visit of our China and India labs, so spent the entire day in meetings and doing a lab tour. I had already anticipated and planned for something a bit stingy but not too long. I also allowed myself to be slow on this 4x1km session:

Heart rate belt behaving strange in first interval

My heart rate belt behaved strange in the first interval. I think it is a bit sensitive when you’re not fully sweating yet, and I hadn’t noticed during the warming up. Only during the first 1k, I noticed that my heart rate stayed at 110 bpm. Between strokes, I moved the sensor by 1mm, and that did the trick.

Not very impressive intensities. On the water, I was pushing towards 300W last season. On the erg, I did a 4x1km on January 6 but that was a full out 1k, followed by 3 sub par 1k intervals.

Second day of visitors, but they were heading towards the airport around 2pm, and I planned to leave for the rowing club around 3pm. This would be the first OTW row of the year!

Things worked out differently. We had a situation to attend to at home, so at 3pm I went home to take care of it, allowing Romana to go rowing. By 11pm everything was relatively under control again, but I skipped training of course.